A Good and Happy Child (24 page)

“When your father died,” he said now, voice scarcely a whisper,

“what was that like for you?”

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After the phone call I stalked the halls like my father in one his funks. A voice inside me said,
You will be man of the house.
My father himself had said it when he was picked up by the van from the Catholic relief organization that would take him to the airport.
Take good care of Momma.
You will be man of the house.
But this was no house to be man of, anymore. Not after the phone call. My mother hovered in her bedroom, or threw herself into household chores like laundry and ironing, a prisoner for seventy-two hours while we waited for the insurance company to call back and explain why they had telephoned to ask if this was Paul N. Davies’s residence and if he was traveling in Honduras. Why were they calling? But it was a flunky, some woman at a desk drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup and rubbing the industrial carpeting with her toes.
We had an inquiry from the Ospitale Santa Maria in Te—Te—Te—

(Tegucigalpa, my mother had interrupted)
which we are checking on
—

someone was carrying an insurance card with that name.
Is it my husband
I
don’t know
Is he sick
I don’t know
Well what’s going on you must know something what kind of treatment are they requesting to be covered
I
don’t know this is just a verification call ma’am we do it when we get a
request from countries the state department has issued warnings for is your
husband traveling in Honduras?

The frantic calls began. Consulate, embassy, the relief organization, Mother in blue jeans and a pink work shirt, unsmiling, bent over the phone. I was her witness—no chores, even, to perform—just a pair of unblinking eyeballs and sharp ears, alternately eavesdropping and tuning out the keening silence of the house with play. But while I played I was ashamed.
Man of the house.
My stuffed monkey, on a sword-fighting adventure; Asterix books; my mother’s phrase, repeatedly overheard, penetrating my summer idleness: “something seriously wrong.”
Oh Abby, we don’t know if something is seriously wrong. Sir, I’m
trying to find out if there is something seriously wrong.
I sat and waited. Mealtimes rolled around like another grinding turn of a mill wheel, and my mother, a slow eater in normal times, ate so slowly as to eat
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nothing; and I gobbled, cleaned my plate, and knew it was wrong to do so, but did it at every meal.

“How did you feel?” asked Richard in his freezing office. Powerless, I told him. Helpless vulnerable wounded. When my father came back he was a skeleton, a series of angles wrapped in hospital sheets, yellow.

“He had jaundice?”

“Yes.”

He could not speak. My father lay mute, nearly unrecognizable—so long in absence, the contours of his face were strange, gaunt. His eyes rolled. My mother rode with him in the ambulance from the Roanoke airport. I sat with him in the hospital and stared at him but he never saw me.

“That must have been very hard for you not to be able to communicate with him.”

“The doctor said the fever was so high he was most likely hallucinating.”

“Were you able to say good-bye?”

“No.”

“Did he ever recognize you?”

“No.”

“Were you able to say good-bye? I mean, for yourself? Say goodbye to him in the hospital, even if he couldn’t respond?”

“No.”

He died with his jaw set at a humiliatingly wrong angle, off to one side under the sunken, translucent cheeks, as if the body no longer protested against gravity and time, and I thought,
There can be no heaven, look at
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my father, he’s just bones, there is no heaven, no soul, we’re just energy boxes,
and when the energy stops, the jawbone hangs off at an angle, and the body
stops pretending to be a person.
I told the priest at the funeral, I tugged his robes and he nearly shoved me automatically along as a child holding up the procession until he recognized that I was the bereaved, and when he took my shoulder, pulled me aside, and leaned over, I told him I didn’t think there was a soul since my father died like an animal, unseeing, unspeaking, just stopped energy. The priest replied,
Scripture
prepares us for this, George. It says we go from “dust to dust.” The soul is
what makes us different from animals. That’s what was in your father. And
when it left him, he did change, you are right.
He was gentle, and whispered this to me as if it were a secret between us, then held my shoulder until someone came for me; I don’t remember who.

“Do you think maybe your dream about your father,” Richard said,

“the one your Friend showed you, might have been a way of saying good-bye to him?”

I shrugged. We sat for a long time.

“It’s freezing in here,” I said.

“I know,” said Richard.

When we were finished I walked alone into the corridor, flush with garbled memories and oddly grateful for the hot and present pain. So this is how you lift a dragon’s curse, I thought. I turned to thank Richard, but the door had closed, cutting off the warm lights, and plunging the hallway into darkness.

N o t e b o o k 1 3

The Practitioner

Saturday came unseasonably cold. Mom said a jet stream had brought the low temperatures from Canada, and I imagined a kind of lateral tornado, like one from the Wizard of Oz, twisting down to touch Virginia with crackling hands of frost.

Still, the sun shone brightly. I sat in my room in a sunbeam, reading, when I heard voices from the hall.

“Tom, it’s too cold for that kind of work, isn’t it?”

“I’m making a giant pot of coffee. He’ll be toasty warm.”

“You don’t give boys coffee, Tom.”

“Hot chocolate, then.”

“Does it have to be today?”

“I’ve got my worker, Reval Dumas, there in the car.” He pronounced the name
ree
-vull
doom
-ah. “He’s got jobs the next three weekends.”

“Reval?” my mother reacted to the name. “I see.”

I was summoned. I found Tom Harris leaning on his crutches in the hall. He had dropped by because he needed my help to fix his smokehouse, he said—the odd jobs were beginning in earnest. Along with the laborer Tom Harris used to “fix things up” around his dilapidated property, I would be engaged in exciting, character-building
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activities such as mixing mortar in a wheelbarrow in the freezing cold, slathering it onto broken sections of wall with a trowel, and patching up that same wall with bricks, acquired at a very reasonable price, secondhand, at the farmers’ co-op. That’s what his words said. His eyes lingered on mine, however, making a point—
you want to do this job.
I peered out the front door. A boatlike Pontiac idled on Piggott Street, frost obscuring the windows.

“I’ll get my coat,” I said instantly.

“George is becoming quite the Boy Scout,” remarked my mother, a little drily.

“Would you want a cripple doing the work, in his place?” said Tom Harris, holding out both hands with exaggerated self-pity. A few minutes later I found myself bundled in two sweaters, a winter coat, a hat, and gloves, making my way across grass so frozen it crackled underfoot, while Tom Harris took up the sidewalk with his splaying crutches. He kept his head low and whispered to me conspiratorially.

“There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Who? Your worker?” I said dubiously.

“I told a white lie,” responded Tom Harris. “Reval Dumas is here to do a job . . . but of a different type. He’s our practitioner,” he said, with a flash of his eyes.

“An exorcist?” I whispered excitedly.

“Not officially,” said Tom Harris, hobbling toward the car. “Not a Catholic. Reval is an
ee
-vangelical missionary. In town just for the day, on his way to Chicago. Going home from Sri Lanka, if you can believe it. Flies out at nine tonight.”

I saw my mother, leaning on the glass of the front window. I waved. Tom Harris waved, too.

“Keep walking,” he said.

“Is he going to help me?”

“Not you. We’re all going to help someone else.”

I stopped. “Then why am I coming?” I whined. “
I
need help.”

Tom Harris halted, too. He wore only his long black overcoat, no
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scarf, leaving his neck and shaggy head bare. When he spoke, wisps of frost curled from his lips; and with the pale November light blue-white on his craggy features, he looked like Old Man Winter.

“I told you we needed to understand your Friend before we acted. This is going to help,” he said. “And you want to know more about your father. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this is what we used to do,” he said. “Now, if you’re no longer interested . . .”

“I’m interested,” I said quickly.

“Oh, good.” His mouth twitched in a smile and he resumed his way down the walk. “Do you remember the woman I told you and your mother about several months ago?” he said. “The woman who spoke in tongues?”

I remembered: the tale about going to the Pentecostal church. The Asian languages professor who got spooked. “Yes,” I replied.

“She got herself in some deep trouble,” said Tom Harris. “Her husband had the good sense to ask for help. Reval Dumas is who they found. Lucky for them.”

As I circled the car, I saw my mother’s figure still in the window, watching us. I imagined her watching my father from that same spot, in similar circumstances. I felt a tingle of adventure, and of pride—
I
was doing what he did.

I realized I was also seeing what he saw: my mother’s face, full of concern, watching from the window. I got in the car.

“Hi George,” said Reval Dumas. “I’m Reval.”

The hard accent hit my ears like a different kind of music—the first Midwestern accent I’d ever heard. I half-expected it to shatter the ice layering over the windshield. Each “r” ripped at the ear like a fishhook, and each phrase rose at the end, in a manner that both ingratiated and posed a prim challenge, as if to say
Yes, you’re George, and yes, I’m
Reval, but what are we going to do about it today?

The owner of the voice surprised me as well. Since I had at first expected a worker, a local, I had imagined a heavyset, smoke-smelling a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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redneck, in worker’s boots and a wool-lined coat, maybe missing teeth. Instead, Reval Dumas was a small man behind the wheel of a vast car. He wore a white shirt and tie, like an insurance salesman, and his hair—yellow-blond—stood on end in a spiky crewcut. His face, however, was pudgy and pink, showing signs of sunburn on the nose and cheeks, giving him a boyish—even babyish—air despite his true age, which I guessed to be midforties. He fixed me in a squint. His full lips pulled around crooked teeth in a small, amused smile.

“Hi,” I answered.

“Tom didn’t mention what a young fellow you are,” he said.

“Tom” came out
Taaam,
that single vowel bold and flat as a quack.

“I’m eleven.”

Reval turned back to give Tom Harris a nervous glance. “Tom . . . if this woman is going through what they say she is . . . George should be at least sixteen. We’re not going to mow a lawn here.”

“Or mend a smokehouse.” Tom Harris winked at me. Then to Reval, meaningfully: “This is Paul Davies’s son.”

The round face turned to me again. The smile disappeared, and the squint deepened.

“Paul Davies,” he repeated. His eyes were glued to me for what seemed like minutes. “I’m sorry about your dad.”

“You knew him?”

“Knew him a little. Knew
of
him.” Reval shook his head. “He was a special person, God bless him.”

“Reval,” said Tom Harris, “George here, young as he is, has been experiencing visions of his own. Not necessarily the good kind. I want him to appreciate the full spectrum of what he may encounter, if he’s not careful.”

“Deep end of the pool, eh? Well, sometimes it’s time, and you’re ready . . . and sometimes it’s just time.” Reval scowled. “Are you ready to step into your father’s shoes, son?”

I quailed at his diamond-hard gaze: he wanted me to enter the demon world—pursuing them with visions. I was only eleven! How could they expect me to take on that kind of responsibility . . .
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“Oh ho ho, you should see your face,” laughed Reval. “I’m just kidding ya. It will be fine,” he said. “It always is.” And with that he started the engine.

r r r

We swerved onto Route 40, dipping under the overpass of an unused trestle bridge, which marked the boundary between Preston and the county on the town’s western side. We passed a development of homes on crisp, treeless lawns, then a fancy horse farm with whitewashed latticed fence. Some miles later, the land rose to a crest, where a Moose Lodge squatted over a gravel parking lot and some incongruous streetlamps, as if marking the last outpost of Preston’s meager urbanity. We cut sharply left, down into a dell.

The road descended and curved, following a creek bed. The trees and bracken grew closer to the road here; brown tresses of winter willows brushed the warning signs and guardrails on our left. The houses stood close to the road, as if huddling against the flat ground.

“Tom says you’re a practitioner,” I ventured.

Tom Harris patiently explained our private lingo.

“Oh,” Reval laughed. “Well. I had a lot of practice in the East. Performing the rite. I borrow one from the Catholic Church.”
Catholic
came out
Kaaa
-tholik. He reached into a bag by his lap and handed to me a mimeographed, stapled set of pages: prayers typed in a big font.

“They know what they’re doing. More of a tradition, am I right?”

Tom Harris averred that he was. “It’s important to have the script. When the demons of confusion come, your brains turn to scrambled eggs. You need that anchor. I’ve seen a lot . . .
weird stuff
since I been out there,” he said. “Done a lot of special blessings. I wouldn’t say it’s
fun.
I don’t need to tell you, Tom. When you see kids in that condition . . .”